Review - Kubo and the Two Strings

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not a return to full reviews for me, I'm afraid. Just an exercise to shake some of the rust off. It'll be back to capsules for awards season movies.

In a bustling village square, in some unnamed era of pre-Imperial Japan, a boy wearing an eye-patch and a baggy samurai robe drops a pile of paper on the ground and strums a power chord on his shamisen. As though by instinct, the crowd turns, silences, and gathers 'round with barely-contained excitement.
“If you must blink, do it now,” instructs Kubo (for that is his name), literally commanding the attention of his audience.

As he plucks the strings and taps harmonic on his instrument, his paper springs to life, folding itself into intricate figurines that run, jump, fly and do pantomimed battle with each other, acting out the drama as Kubo narrates a tale of adventure and heroism for the delighted onlookers.

We are (shrewdly) given no explanation of this sorcery, and honestly, we're too bedazzled to care. Just like the throng of villagers rapt by Kubo's paper players, when we sit down to a Laika feature we are being treated to the most elaborate puppet show ever imaginable. Or at least until Laika – the stop-motion animation studio behind this thrilling illusion – imagines a way to make it more yet elaborate for their next trick.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Guys, we need to talk about Best Animated Feature. Most years, this is one category that hardly requires discussion at all. If it isn't a slam dunk victory for one obvious frontrunner (which it almost always is), then it can at least be boiled down to a two-horse race with the also-rans far in the distance. This year was shaping up to be another easy call you could use to inflate your prediction accuracy, until the biggest shocker of nomination morning. Everyone enjoys griping about presumed snubs that ultimately don't affect the outcome of the awards race, but this is one snub that has truly blown the category wide open.

The cast of The LEGO Movie is stunned by its Oscar snub!

'Boxtrolls' leads ANNIE Award nominations

The New York critics weren't the only ones sounding off this Monday, as ASIFA-Hollywood released their loooong list of nominees. Laika's The Boxtrolls hauled in 13 nominations, the most of any contender in the field. Clearly there's a lot of respect for the craft, and rightly so.

Not too far behind with ten nominations of its own was DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2, which would be my preference for the win, but I'm not getting my hopes too high. There's a logical argument to be made that the hipness of The LEGO Movie will lead it to victory this season. We shall see.

The Best Animated Short category, meanwhile, features five of the contenders on the Oscar shortlist.

Check out all the film nominees after the cut, with some subjective commentary:

Review - The Boxtrolls

Laika – the Portland-based studio that specializes in a unique hybridization of stop-motion and computer animation – manages to draw ever-growing mountains of praise with every new feature they release, and not without good reason. Though geared primarily towards children, they never coddle their young audience, choosing stories that aren't afraid of being a little scary, a little dark, and even a little morbid. It's also impossible not to marvel at the studio's meticulous hand-made process, which has even become the lynchpin of their marketing identity.

But it begs the question: Even though the stories they tell are great, and the techniques they employ are great, is Laika churning out movies that are great? I'm not so sure they are. Of the three entries in their modest portfolio to date, 2009's Coraline is probably the closest thing to a complete film. Their follow-up, 2012's ParaNorman, exhibited exciting artistic growth but flagged in the story department. And now their latest, The Boxtrolls (directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi), might be their most technically evolved, but overall weakest film yet.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Never can I remember the race for Best Animated Feature being as competitive as its been this year. Not that I think it's been a particularly stellar year for the medium. To me, the closeness of the race is due to all the nominees achieving roughly the same level of enjoyable mediocrity, with one standout clearly above the rest, but that doesn't mean it has the Oscar locked up.

Review - ParaNorman

Taking cues from their own deliciously creepy Coraline from 2009, the animation studio Laika Entertainment serves up another stop-motion spooker for kids, the often charmingly macabre ParaNorman.

Kodie Smit-McPhee (The Road) voices the spiky-haired misfit Norman, a low-key loner with a peculiar knack for communicating with the dead. Maligned and tormented by his peers and even family, Norman escapes their harsh judgments by watching cheap zombie flicks and indulging in conversations with his late grandmother. His sixth sense may cause him troubles, but it comes in handy when an ancient witch's curse raises a septet of pilgrim corpses from the grave, and only he has the ability to stop it.